Monday, 13 March 2017

DALE CARNEGIE

My daughter has reached that age when she is thinking more
seriously about her career path. She is HR Manager for a fairly large company
[400 employees] and has held similar positions in businesses such as P&G
and WSP. She attends high-powered business courses and was telling us yesterday
about one held in Manchester where the session was about bias in the workplace:

‘We were split into
three groups. They showed us a film of someone playing a piano concerto; one
group could hear the music but were unable to see the pianist; the next group
could see the pianist but couldn’t hear the music; the third group could both
hear and see the music and the musician. Then we were asked to rate the quality
of the piece; this was the result:

ØPeople who
could both hear and see: 56% liked the music.

ØPeople who
could only hear the music: 51% liked it.

ØPeople who
could only see the pianist: 68% liked
the music’

A fairly amazing outcome and the facilitator said she got
the same result every time.

Speaks volumes about bias. Isn’t this the USP of television
shows like The Voice? When the judge
turns round and sees that the contestant is 99-years old or of Asian heritage,
it is as good as over for them.

I once attended a course run by the Dale Carnegie
Management Consultancy. I’m not, you know embarrassed by that; I didn’t go to
Uni so I had to use the tools available to me to run a business. We needed
training and they offered the right package at the right price. It came about
like this: we wanted to achieve a business qualification called Investors in People which a lot of
Construction Industry sub-contractors were applying for, particularly in London
but couldn’t think how to go about it. There was no shortage of ‘Management
Consultants’ in Newcastle but were they right for us? An awful lot of them
seemed to be man & wife set-ups who seemed superficially to be a good fit
for our relatively small company [14 employees] but all of our employees were
highly skilled and we weren’t at all sure they would take kindly to being
lectured to by people with, frankly rather less intellectual weight than they
had themselves. Plus, my people worked incredibly hard and efficiently. On any
given day we might have someone in London, someone in Glasgow and someone in
Liverpool all of whom would not get home until after ten at night. They didn’t need
motivating but perhaps they did need help with strategic thinking.

So, my accountant and I were in a bar, a very unique event,
discussing how we might go about getting this qualification when a thin woman
in a suit approached us from out of a group of about ten, sitting together at
another table. She apologised for interrupting, introduced herself and said she
had overheard us talking about Investors
in People and thought she could help. She turned out to be the area manager
for the Dale Carnegie organisation, up from Manchester just for the day.

Felt like fate. God, the number of times that has happened
to me in my life; just as I am scratching my head about how to resolve some
intractable problem, the answer walks up and taps me on the shoulder. I had
never been in that bar before. She had come up from Manchester for that one
day.

I was so, so impressed with her; walking up to a complete
stranger in a bar like that.

We signed up.

On her course, I learned:

ØPublic speaking

ØLeadership

ØInterviewing

ØCommunicating concepts toothers

To be honest, at that point in my largely successful life I
thought I knew enough about leadership and communication but it turned out I
knew nowt. I certainly knew nowt about public speaking before I went on the
course and I came out the other end really quite confident about getting up in
front of an audience. I remember having to talk in front of about thirty people
and teach them how to swim, without props.

After that I sent four of my senior staff on the same
course [£2000ea] which may have been a mistake because they all left for better
jobs, within two-years. The super-training meant that they were suddenly
ambitious for other opportunities. Speaking to my daughter last night about
what a waste of money it seemed to be she said they would have moved on anyway if
you didn’t give them any training: it was a lose-lose situation. If you didn’t put
them on a high level training course they would go elsewhere because they would
feel stunted and restricted, if you did put them on a quality training course
they would move on as soon as it seemed ethically acceptable to do so. What
about loyalty? ‘Business is different now, there is a great deal of churn; most
people move jobs every two years’.

It’s a glass ceiling in a way; everybody thinks it looks
easy but out by themselves in the harsh, cold reality of cut+thrust business
life, it is a great deal harder than it looks.